The Trump indictment criminalizes political dissent

The serial indictments and investigations of former President Trump are meant to rig the 2024 presidential election, but the latest indictment is unique in rigging even its aftermath.

(Article by Daniel Greenfield republished from FrontPageMag.com)

Previous indictments of the former president had broken all sorts of new legal ground by turning misdemeanors into felonies and deciding that the statute of limitations is just a suggestion, but the Jan 6 indictment by Democrat special counsel Jack Smith criminalizes election challenges.

Or at least election challenges against Democrats. And along with that, all political dissent.

The Jan 6 indictment contends that Trump’s election challenges were a crime. What does this latest indictment offer that the previous indictments did not? This one is designed to intimidate any Republicans who might seek to challenge the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.

Unsatisfied with indicting the leading GOP primary candidate in order to rig the election, Democrats are criminalizing political opposition before and after the upcoming election.

The indictment reads more like a Washington Post editorial with its contention that Trump was “determined to remain in power” and so “spread lies” that there had been fraud to “create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.”

If contending that a presidential election was stolen is illegal, where is Al Gore’s indictment? No Democrats have ever been charged for claiming that Bush was elected by hanging chads, for challenging his election both times in Congress, or for spreading lies and launching investigations for their false claims that Trump had been elected by the Russians, even when they did this in order to “create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger.”

When Democrats spread lies about an election, they get book deals and evening slots on MSNBC, and sometimes, like Gore, they even get Oscars and Nobel peace prizes.

Challenging elections has been a traditional practice going back over two centuries to the 1800 presidential election. Free nations with open elections are not afraid of election challenges and the Democrats have spent a fortune on their own election challenge efforts. The Biden campaign spent $20 million on over sixty post-election lawsuits in 2020.

Smith, a longtime Democrat crony, won’t be indicting Biden or Marc Elias. Instead, he’s indicting Trump for such invented crimes as “obstructing and impeding the January 6 congressional proceeding”, a “conspiracy against the right to vote” and a conspiracy to “obstruct” the “lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted and certified by the federal government.”

Describing publicly conducted election challenges as an effort to “defraud” the United States government turns 18 U.S. Code § 371 into an open-ended tool for suppressing a wide range of political dissent. Treating lobbying or any kind of advocacy as the equivalent of witness tampering weaponizes 18 U.S. Code § 1512 against virtually anyone trying to influence a function of government. Which is to say virtually everyone who is interested in politics. And finally deploying 18 U.S. Code § 241, originally designed to fight the KKK, against Trump and anyone trying to verify legitimate election results makes election fraud into a civil right.

Beyond the malicious abuses of federal law to target a political opponent, Jack Smith’s indictment will create an unprecedented suppression of the political opposition that will not end with Trump or with the 2024 presidential election. Smith has done nothing less than to take sections of the law and use them to build a criminal infrastructure that can be used to outlaw most political parties and activities on a level with that of Communist China or Russia.

This was the totalitarian state of affairs that Russiagate had only hinted at but that is reaching its maturity with an indictment that is not merely unconstitutional, but that seeks to replace any kind of open political system with a paranoid surveillance state that ruthlessly stamps out any threat to “democracy” by abusing existing laws to selectively target and imprison political opponents.

And that is what is really at stake here.

Read more at: FrontPageMag.com